


penance clears the eye

by bluexshift



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst, Coda, M/M, Post-Episode: s03e18 The Beast Within, Self-Harm, i don't know how the rating works i just pick one tbh, rated M for language and mild violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 08:08:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18494866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluexshift/pseuds/bluexshift
Summary: alec and magnus have the tendency to punish themselves for crimes only they believe they have committed. without each other, they can't help but sink back into the old friend that is pain





	penance clears the eye

**Author's Note:**

> i feel like just writing with absolutely no idea where it's going is the best way about it? because once again, i have no idea what this is, but it's a thing! i did a thing!
> 
> would just like to say that while i am the WORST at responding to comments (i will do it, i promise), every single one brings me so much joy and i cannot thank you enough if you've ever left one.
> 
> this fic contains canon-typical depictions of self-harm, but also references to magnus's alcoholism and a mention of vomiting, if you're emetophobic.

Neither of them could really admit to healthy coping mechanisms.

But when you’re sat in the shattered pieces of your own heart, who the fuck cares about healthy?

 

* * *

 

 

Magnus stands there shocked for longer than he can even comprehend – the passing of time is inconsequential to him right now, since his world as he knows it has ended – and he barely even notices when his knees give out and he sinks heavily to the floor. The tears flow freely now, and he chokes out strangled sobs where he sits on his calves, vision blurring so that Maryse’s shop is now just hues of yellow and brown. Maryse’s shop. The woman who’d always hated him. She’d said they were family earlier.

He guesses Alexander just didn’t feel the same as she did.

He cries until he can’t anymore, until his breathing is harsh and ragged and his throat sore from it. He thinks about the evening he’s had. _Clave business_ , Alec had said. Magnus wonders if he’d lied, when he’d claimed it wasn’t about Magnus’s drinking – wonders if he’d sent him to Maryse not to keep him busy but because Alec couldn’t stand the sight of the mess of a man Magnus was. He finds it strange – Alec could accept, could love the demon part of him so easily, but this human, messy, shambolic side of him was too much in the end.

He doesn’t blame Alec. He wants to, though, but he can’t. He’d leave himself too if he could. It's what everyone does eventually.

Magnus needs to move from this spot, needs to finish the work he started, needs to do something, _anything_. He’d drink himself into a stupor, usually. Usually. When he was still a warlock. He’d meant what he said though, he really was going to do something about his drinking – it wasn’t fair to insist that Alec curb his self-harming behaviours and rely on his loved ones more when Magnus couldn’t even do the same, was it?

He scoffed out loud at that. It wasn’t like Alec even wanted to be here to help him with that anyway.

Magnus can’t get up, so he crawls on his hands and knees over books and rugs, knowing that if he can just make it to the counter, he can use it to pull himself up and pull himself together. He catches sight of himself in a mirror when he reaches it. The former High Warlock of Brooklyn, beloved son of the most powerful Prince of Hell, possibly the most powerful warlock on Earth if he wanted to be, reduced to… _this._ Crawling around on the floor of an exiled ex-Circle members shop with eyeliner tracks betraying where his tears were, eyes red and puffy and lips cracked. He's disgusting.

He drags himself up and drags the bottle of white Maryse had offered earlier towards him. He might be nothing now but he’s still rich. He’ll pay her back.

He slumps into one of the mismatched chairs and doesn’t stop until he’s drained the entire bottle. And even then, only so he can get the bottle of red and open that too. It’s not until he’s over halfway through that the mix of wine really hits his empty stomach – _has he eaten today? he doesn’t think so –_ and he lurches to the toilet to throw it all back up again.

This is how Maryse will find him before dawn the next morning, passed out on the restroom floor, still clutching a now empty bottle – mostly drunk, the rest in a puddle on the floor that has soaked through his clothes where he lies in misery. _Pathetic_ , he thinks before his vision goes black. He thinks he hears his fathers’ voice in his own.

 

* * *

 

 

Alec doesn’t return to the Institute that night. He can’t.

He tells himself that it’s best avoided, that Magnus will need his stuff, that he can’t see him or he will break. It’s not entirely true. There’s a subconscious part of Alec that knows that despite his good intentions, he still hurt Magnus, and he deserves to be punished for it.

The drevek demon outbreak is over, he dealt with that. But it’s still Halloween. There are still plenty of demons out. Still plenty of work that he must do. Alec hunts, and he kills, and he starts again, because that’s what he’s good at. It’s the only thing he’s good at, and it’s the only thing he’s ever been allowed to have, and he was a fucking idiot for ever thinking he could have more.

He imagines Asmodeus’ face on a particularly gruesome ravener. It only serves to remind him of his words.

“You are the cause of all his suffering.”

_Thwack_. The arrow hits dead centre. Asmodeus was right, though.

_Thwack._ Alec forget to bend his arm enough, and the string hits his forearm. It stings. It feels right.

By the time dawn breaks, he’s been at it for hours without a rest. He’s run for miles, runes pushed to their limits and reapplied immediately, muscles screaming in protest and body slick with sweat and ichor and his own blood. He sprained an ankle around 0300.

He didn’t, doesn’t, heal it. Doesn’t deserve to heal an injury he shouldn’t have gotten in the first place. He should have been better.

Alec finds himself in an alley, having chased a beast down three blocks and cornered it. It’s vicious now, trapped and desperate, and he relishes the adrenaline, the feeling of anything at all. He ran out of arrows about an hour ago, despite him retrieving the ones he could every time, so he faces it with a seraph blade and a battered body and sheer will to do his duty. They face each other in stalemate, two equally dangerous predators waiting for the other to break first.

The demon leaps forward first, and Alec stands to meet it sword raised high. It never makes it.

The whip comes from behind him and severs its head from its neck with ease. He turns to see not only Izzy but his mom too, framed in the morning light. They wear matching expressions of relief and fury and they have never looked so alike.

“Alec where have you _been_ all night?” Izzy starts first, but she’s eclipsed nearly immediately by Maryse, fire in her voice in a way Alec hasn’t heard since he was a child.

“Alexander Gideon, _what have you done_.”

He swallows. Izzy looks at Maryse, then back at him, silent, jaw trembling.

“Oh Alec. Alec you didn’t…”

He breaks.

He lets out all the emotional pain that the physical could not temper, and he sobs uncontrollably into his mother’s shoulder as she lowers him down, holds him on the floor of this filthy passageway as his sister holds his hand and tremors wrack his body.

Alec handed Magnus the power to destroy him months ago, believing himself to be safe, and yet Alec has destroyed himself again.


End file.
